A church worker arranges flowers for Christmas at a church in Kunming, Yunnan province, China, Dec. 23. (CNS photo/Reuters)

China has
an old adage: “The closer you are to the emperor, the closer you get to the
dragon’s claws.” This is as true today in Communist China as it was in imperial
China. In a 1724 imperial edict, Emperor Yongzheng stated, “The Catholic
religion from the West is not to be regarded as orthodox…and our laws cannot
tolerate it.” And 216 years later, Chairman Mao Zedong declared, “In the field
of political action Communists may form an anti-imperialist and anti-feudal
united front with some idealists and even religious people, but we can never
approve their idealism or religious doctrines.” Whenever Mao became displeased
with China’s Catholic bishops, he labeled them “counter-revolutionaries,” which
was convenient, for in 1951 he exclaimed, “Please make certain that you strike
surely, accurately, and relentlessly in suppressing the counter-revolutionaries.”

China’s
rulers, throughout the Church’s long history in the Middle Kingdom, have often struck out at the Catholic faithful
who have grown steadily since Matteo Ricci first founded his Chinese mission
400 years ago. The Church of the 21st century, now only a decade old, has
encountered new crosses under China’s leadership, and recent months have
ushered in renewed restrictions on the fragile Catholic community. Two bishops in
particular have become the authoritative voices to speak to, and about, the
Church in China todayBishop Aloysius Jin Luxian and Cardinal Joseph Zen.

I spoke with
Bishop Aloysius Jin in Shanghai, and asked the Catholic prelate who is perhaps
the most intimately involved with China’s authorities how someone in such close
proximity to an officially anti-religious government manages to navigate.
Bishop Jin smiled and quoted Matthew 10:16, wherein Jesus exhorts his
disciples: “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be wise
as serpents and innocent as doves.”

“The
government thinks I’m too close to the Vatican,” he said, “and the Vatican
thinks I’m too close to the government.” Jin, who is now more than 95 years
old, was consecrated a bishop in 1985 without the Pope’s mandate; he has been
called “the government’s bishop,” though since then the Vatican has recognized
his return into full communion with Rome.

He notes
that the situation for Catholics in China has become increasingly divided,
after the close of the more tolerant era of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Whereas
in previous years the underground and official Catholic communities had begun
to collaborate, Jin notes, “It is not at all true that the line between us [the
sanctioned Catholic community] and the underground is disappearing. In fact,
the division is now growing worse.” He continued to assert that since the
official Catholic community is more visible, it is held under more intense
scrutiny. “We live under enormous pressure to acquiesce to Party demands,” Jin
states. Among Bishop Jin’s principal complaints is that Cardinal Joseph Zen
“encourages China’s underground Church to remain firm in its opposition to the
sanctioned Church.”

Less than
a month later, I met with Cardinal Zen, who now resides at the Salesian House
of Studies in Hong Kong. Zen is considered the most informed person alive today
regarding what happens to Catholics within the Great Wall, and he is also known
for his outspokenness concerning the government’s treatment of Christianity.
Bishop Jin is correct about Cardinal Zen; he does advise the underground to remain
separate from the “open” Church.

“Why
should the underground surrender to the open Church?” Zen asks, especially
since the open community is already burdened under Party control. The Catholic Patriotic
Association is the mechanism the Chinese government employs to bridle the
Church in that country, and Zen describes China’s sanctioned bishops as the
“slaves” of Liu Bainian, the Association’s controversial chairman.

Given the
disagreements between these two prelates, Jin and Zen, it is a testament of
Christian charity that these two men met with such equanimity when Cardinal Zen
visited Shanghai last October. In an interview with the Catholic online news
source Asia News, Cardinal Zen exclaimed that the “meeting of two brothers in
the Lord after years was great joy,” though he also stated that it was “like a
fly in the ointment. We are great friends, but we knew that there were some
words that couldn’t be said…as the ‘system’ doesn’t warrant it.”

Under the
current restrictions imposed on the Church in China, especially on members of
the Patriotic Association such as Bishop Jin, the “system” that Cardinal Zen
laments has become “a wall in people’s hearts and a lock in people’s mouths.”
One rumor surrounding the cardinal’s visit to Mainland China suggested that
Bishop Jin’s spokesman denied media access to Jin without first attaining
official permission from the Patriotic Association. As China’s most
high-profile bishop, and one firmly attached to the Patriotic Association, Jin
is understandably hesitant to tempt the dragon’s claws.

China’s rising shortage of clergy

While
China’s bishops remain pressured under state restraints, and while the
authorities devise methods of further deepening the divisions between the
underground and above-ground communities, priests in the trenches are
experiencing their own difficulties. Unlike the cathedral churches in large
metropolitan cities such as Shanghai, Beijing, and Guiyang, which often have
several priests in residence who offer Mass daily, rural churches more commonly
see a priest only once a month.

In the
bustling diocese of Taiyuan, for instance, priests are often assigned to the
pastoral care of four, five, or six large churches, sometimes hours apart. In
this diocese, China’s most active, priests hear several hours of confessions at
each stop on their routes, as well as offer Masses, teach catechism courses,
administer final sacraments to the ill and dying, witness marriages, and settle
the inevitable disputes that in arise in parishes without a permanent pastor.
The number of Catholics in China has risen from three million at the time of
the Communist takeover in 1949 to around 20 million today, despiteor perhaps
because ofunremitting persecutions. But vocations have not risen along with
the number of faithful, and priests are greatly burdened by demanding schedules
and the expectations of their flocks.

In
December 2010, I spoke with Father Zhang Jingfeng, a priest from China’s vast
Inner Mongolian steppe, who informed me that within his diocese priests presently
bear pressures from two main sources. Firstly, they are overtaxed by the
demands precipitated by the increasing shortage of clergy, and secondly they
often endure extremely strained relationships with their bishops. Bishops of
the sanctioned Church in China are themselves squeezed between governmental
coercions and pastoral exigencies. The result is that bishops feel a need to
manage their priests closely for fear of official harassment, and their priests
in turn do not trust their bishops, sensing that they are political puppets. Father
Zhang informed me that the unfortunate consequence of these two factors is that
many priests are tempted to leave the priesthood.

Father
Peng Xin, from the Catholic Diocese of Wuhan, has experienced this climate of distrust
firsthand. He received his theological education in Paris, and thus China’s
local authorities are hesitant to trust him; his phone, email, and room are all
bugged, and his fellow priests are nervous about associating with him. His
bishop, who is a member of the Patriotic Association, also maintains a certain
distance from him. It is precisely these kinds of pressures that lead Chinese
clergy to disappear into secular life.

China’s
growing political control over the Church in that country has also resulted in
tremendous uncertainty among the faithful. While visiting Kunming’s beautiful
cathedral, I was struck by the unusual number of images of and quotations from
Pope Benedict XVI; bulletin boards, cathedral columns, inside and outside walls
all featured large posters of the Pope and the Vatican. Interestingly, the
local ordinary, Bishop Joseph Ma Yinglin, is one of the few prelates in China
who still does not have the Vatican’s approval. When he was consecrated a
bishop on April 30, 2006, the Vatican’s spokesperson, Joaquin Navarro-Valls,
immediately announced Ma’s excommunication. Navarro-Valls reported, “The Holy
Father has learned of the news with profound displeasure,” and he noted that
Ma’s consecration “is a grave wound to the unity of the Church.”

In fact,
the Vatican describes such illicit ordinations of bishops as grave violations
of religious liberty. The faithful are naturally confused to see their
cathedral decorated with images of the Pope, the very Pope who excommunicated
their bishop; in this diocese the underground
community has grown
larger than the above-ground, causing deeper grievances between fellow
Catholics. As of this writing, the Diocese of Kunming features a prominent
image of Pope Benedict XVI on its official website. And some clergy who are
loyal to Rome in this region feel compelled to at least temporarily leave the
priesthood, thus leaving the faithful with few places to receive the sacraments
necessary to Catholic life.

New bishops and new divisions

Despite
ongoing disputes between the Vatican and China’s government regarding who has
the right to select priests to be ordained bishopsa right the Pope reserves
exclusively to himselfChina’s Catholic Patriotic Association persists in
selecting and forcing the consecration of clergy it believes can be politically
influenced by the state. In November 2010, Father Joseph Guo Jincai was ordained a bishop at Chende without a
papal mandate, and the Vatican responded precisely as it did when Ma Yinglin
was similarly consecrated, with a firm criticism of China’s interference with religious
freedom:

This ordination not only does not contribute to the good of the Catholics
of Chengde, but places them in a very delicate and difficult condition, also
from the canonical point of view, and humiliates them, because the Chinese
civil authorities wish to impose on them a pastor who is not in full communion,
either with the Holy Father or with the other bishops throughout the world.

Compounding the
problem, eight other bishops, all in communion with Rome, were obliged to
attend the ceremony and concelebrate, which Cardinal Zen described as
“shameful” and “illegal.”

For its part,
China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs retaliated against Vatican
complaints by asserting, “The Vatican’s position is well-known. It works
to promote political ideas under the pretext of religious belief, which is very
dangerous and will seriously harm the healthy development of Chinese
Catholicism in China.” Most recently, Chinese state authorities have maneuvered
Bishop Fang Xingyao, who does not have papal approval, into the driver’s seat
of the Catholic Patriotic Association, further damaging Vatican-China
relations.

Renewed persecutions

It is no
secret that Marx was opposed to institutional religion. In his 1843 study of
the philosopher Hegel, Marx famously wrote:

The struggle against religion is,
therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is
religion…. It is the opium of the people.
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand
for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about
their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires
illusions.

In other words, religious attachment is, according to Marx,
a method of escapism from real social injustices and suffering. While he indeed
suggests that people should be called to give up the “illusion” of religion,
Marx does not demand the ruthless anti-religious persecutions advocated by
totalitarian governments. In the case of China, the Catholic Church suffers
because of its religious nature, but even more acutely because of the state’s
perception that Catholics are a threat to national control; Marx’s somewhat
humanitarian, if deluded, view that freeing people from religion clarifies their
awareness of social injustice is distorted in China’s official treatment of
Catholics.

And how has the government’s reinterpretation of Marx’s
anti-religious views manifested itself in China’s Catholic community? It
resulted in the murder and almost wholesale destruction or confiscation of
Catholic property during the Maoist era (1949-1976). Shortly after 2011 began,
the Catholics of Hebei, the province surrounding China’s capital, reported the
sudden and unexplained arrest of Father Peter Zhang Guangjun. On January 13,
public security officers knocked on the door of a Catholic household that Father
Zhang was visiting, and abducted the priest; he had been offering pastoral care
to underground Catholics in the area. Sources in Hebei have suggested that the
government is cracking down on priests who do not carry “priest identification
cards,” in hopes of forcing more Catholic clergy to function under the
observant auspices of the Patriotic Association. As of this writing Father
Zhang’s whereabouts are still unknown.

In addition, Chinese authorities arrested Bishop Joseph Li
Liangui of Cangzhou (Xianxian) in December 2010 when he refused to attend the
state-organized National Conference of Catholic Representatives. Bishop Li was
forced to go to “study sessions,” and was threatened with removal as Cangzhou’s
bishop if he did not “repent.” The bishops who did attend the conferenceall
but Joseph Limet with one of China’s senior Party officials, Jia Qinglin, at
the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen. Jia reiterated the government’s
resolve to prevent foreign influences (that is, papal influences) in China’s
affairs, and some of the bishops attending the conference refused to raise
their hands during voting. Their un-raised hands were, however, counted as
positive votes by the state officials present at the proceedings. Bishop Li has
since been returned to his cathedral, but his recalcitrance has not gone
unnoticed, and some expect him to be replaced once the government can locate an
“acceptable” prelate to fill his chair.

Old wounds and new healing

Like
Janus, a god in Greek mythology, China’s Catholic Church still has two faces;
it appears that for every tragedy and incident of division there is also a
victory and opportunity for healing. Even as China continues to defy Vatican
pleas to stop forcing the ordination of Chinese bishops without papal support,
and as priests and bishops have suffered from state persecutions, the government
extended an olive branch to Catholic prelates of Taiwan. The secretary general
of the Chinese Catholic Patriotic Association, Liu Yuanlong, led a Mainland
delegation in early January 2011 to discuss how to improve relations between
China’s Catholics and those in Taiwan. Liu stated his purpose for visiting
Taiwan was “to enhance understanding, harmony, and peace through these kinds of
exchanges, and eventually move towards unification.” The representative of the
Patriotic Association did not clarify whether the Mainland’s desired
“unification” involved China’s sanctioned Church and the Vatican, or simply the
unity the Mainland’s Catholics with those of Taiwan. Whatever motivations bring
China’s officials to Taiwan, it can be seen as a positive step toward
normalizing the Church in China.

While
visiting Guiyang’s splendid Catholic cathedral, near the place where martyrs
spilled their blood, I asked Father Liu Xianjun, a priest in the open Church,
what China’s Catholics desired most. “We wish above all that the Pope could be
free to walk on Chinese soil,” he said. The history of the Church in China is
not unlike the history of the Church in Rome. Like Roman Christians, China’s
early Christians suffered extreme persecution and martyrdom, from the blood of
the martyrs the Church grew, and now China boasts its own saints to remember at
Mass. But one difference remains tragically persistent: not a single Pope has
visited the Middle Kingdom. The very center of Christian unity has been barred
from his flock in the world’s largest nation, and China’s present political
climate, still under the shadow of Mao, shows no signs of opening the Great
Wall to the bishop of Rome.

In fact,
Sino-Vatican tensions have reached new heights, especially after Pope Benedict
XVI prayed at the 2010 Midnight Mass that the spiritual message of Christmas
will “strengthen the spirit of faith, patience, and courage of the faithful of
the Church in Mainland China,” sharply attacking China’s government for
imposing limitations on “their freedom of religion and conscience.” The Pope
then called the Church of China to endure the “discrimination and persecution”
imposed upon it. China responded by reaffirming old battle lines between it and the Vatican. A
spokeswoman from the government’s foreign ministry stated: “We hope the
Vatican side can face the facts of China’s freedom of religion and the
development of Catholicism, and create favorable conditions for the improvement
of China-Vatican relations through concrete actions.” While low-level accords
have grown between the Patriotic Association and the Catholic bishops of
Taiwan, high-level antagonism has also grown between China’s Party and the
Vatican.

In his book about the Church under Communism,
James Meyers writes, “The fate of the Catholic Church in China over the years
since 1949 has been closely linked to the twists and turns in Chinese domestic
politics.” Today’s domestic politics have turned decidedly toward a new
isolationism based on China’s quest for world economic dominance, built as it
is on heightened nationalism. By defining itself distinctly against foreign
nationsChina against all otherseven its religious groups must remain independent.
Thus, Roman Catholicism is problematic in today’s China precisely because it is
viewed as more “Roman” than “Chinese.” China’s new “emperors” are as suspicious
of foreign religion as its old emperors, and as long as the Church’s hierarchy
is held so close to the dragon’s claws it will remain afraid to speak and
function with freedom.

About the Author

Anthony E. Clark, Ph.D.

Anthony E. Clark is an associate professor of Chinese history at Whitworth University and the author of China’s Saints: Catholic Martyrdom During the Qing, 1644-1911. He is also the host of the EWTN television series The Saints of China: Martyrs of the Middle Kingdom.

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